HOUSE EXCHANGES WITH EXTRAS

           

 



George Orwell lived for a time on Portobello Road, just a few blocks from the London flat that was our first house exchange in this 4-month series of home swaps.  One of Orwell’s best known works is Animal Farm, and in it the chief pig famously states that, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”  This could also be said of house exchanges.  They’re all equal in that they accomplish the fundamental goal of house exchanges:  you get to stay somewhere else for free, and that “somewhere” is a place you really want to visit and probably wouldn’t be able to experience if you had to pay for a hotel.  You also have a kitchen and refrigerator so that you don’t have to eat out every meal, and a living area so you’re not on top of each other all the time.  This usually results in longer stays in your destination, which is another plus.

But some house exchanges offer extras that go beyond the room-and-board-and-location triumvirate.  Pools, for example.  We stayed in a house in Florida that had an indoor pool.  A pool in your house – it was such a novel concept that I would have signed up for an exchange if the house had been located in West Nowhere and I had to be helicoptered into it.  Then there are the second homes with pools.  We’ve had a couple that were straight out of Better Homes and Gardens or in this case, Snooty People’s Snooty Houses You Could Never Afford No Matter How Hard You Work.  One was in Costa Rica and the pool overlooked the Pacific Ocean.  Needless to say, our grand plans to experience all of Costa Rica’s beautiful nature drowned in that pool.  If we could have slept in it, we would have.

Another place with a pool was in St. Croix.  This one overlooked the Caribbean, and we spent so much time in it that we pioneered a new game: bobble.  Bobble is a physically challenging and deeply complicated game that should be in the Olympics except we’re the only three people in the world who know how to play it. (Which means there is a sporting event in which my family would be guaranteed a gold, silver or bronze medal, so dammit, let’s bring Bobble to the 2012 Olympics!)

Bobble involves catching water-soaked balls in your open palm and bouncing them three times and then tossing them to the next person.  This may sound easy, but believe me, if you’re treading water in the deep end and trying to bounce balls in your hand before, during or after a certain number of pina coladas, it can be quite a challenging exercise.  We became such bobble experts in St. Croix that we hauled the plastic pool chairs into the pool and played bobble standing on the chairs in the deep end, and then standing on one leg on the chair in the deep end, and then hopping on one foot on the chair in the deep end.  I had calf muscles of steel and a liver of mush by the time we ended our Caribbean bobble-fest. 

 

But this London house exchange came with extras I’ve never experienced in our previous dozen home swaps.  The three cats, for example, and the caged gerbils that spent all day, every day, gnawing on the bars of their cage in a hopeless, Sartre-ish “No Exit” attempt to gain freedom.  Their cage was stuck on top of the kitchen cupboards to protect them from the cats, which would have made the gerbils’ freedom short-lived if they’d somehow grown metal files for teeth and managed to saw their way through the bars.  “I’m Free!” the gerbils would have squeaked, shortly before entering the dark tunnel of the cat’s esophagus.  Their hopeless gnawing and rustling around in their pine shavings was a mournful counterpoint to any time spent in the kitchen, and required vigilance about where you left your coffee cup if you didn’t want bits o’gerbil floating in it.

 

The cats were also a fun-filled addition, particularly the kitten who became increasingly animated as the night-time hours passed.  The kitten had a bell on her collar so that you’d hear her jingle jingle jingling up and down the hall all night long like Santa’s reindeer on a bender.  After she’d completed her obligatory seventy-five thousand laps up and down the hall, she’d jump up onto the bed and slowly slink her way up your supine body to your head.  The sight of your slumbering visage evidently filled her with a wild kitten joy because she’d burst into throaty purring that sounded as if a motorboat had just docked in your ear.  If for some unknown reason the jingling windsprints, body slink or roaring purr had somehow failed to wake you, she deployed her secret weapon: the head curl.  This involved curling up on your sleeping head and draping her tail across your face and twitching it in a happy little, “isn’t it grand to be alive?” kind of way until you woke up from restless dreams of things crawling on you to the real-life experience of things crawling on you. 

 

My favorite parts of the flat, though, were the Soviet-era appliances in the kitchen.  You think of London as being a world-class city, which it absolutely is, but it’s a city filled with people who know a little something about deprivation and doing without.  Londoners were on ration cards until the 1950s as England struggled to recover from the enormously damaging and economically costly war.  There’s a photo in the Imperial War Museum of children storming a candy shop on the 1950s day on which sweets rationing finally ended.  They were like sugar groupies rushing the stage of their favorite band:  The Candies.   During the War, Londoners were abstemious in their consumption of food and goods and I think that “make do” attitude still continues, particularly when compared to the typical American super-sized standard of consumption.  This is probably why we saw so few genuinely fat Brits in London– they weren’t super-sizing their way through the day. 

 

You also have to be fairly fit to live in London since 90 percent of the people who work in the City get there on mass transit, and there are a lot of stairs, believe me, in the London underground.  A lot.  It’s like the Andes, only horizontal.  Max’s pedometer informed us at the end of each day how many miles we’d logged, and we averaged 6-8 miles a day and a significant percentage of those miles were generated by climbing the stairs and walking the loooonnnngggggg tunnel halls of the London Underground.  I thought of the fat ‘Murikans riding up and down the escalators on the DC metro, or the many more who eschew public transportation for the ass-widening comfort of their rush-hour-stalled cars.  London is, in many ways, exactly what cities should aspire to.  If 90 percent of the people who work in DC got there on the metro or buses, the air quality of the DC area would be amazingly improved, not to mention the cardio-vascular health of the typical DC worker.  You walk down the street in London and here’s what you don’t see:  SUVs.  Min-vans.  Any car bigger than a mini.  In fact, hardly any cars.  You walk down a DC street at rush hour and here’s what you see:  a roiling cauldron of seething commuters navigating cars the size of small tanks down the street.  Why anyone needs an SUV or Jeep in DC is beyond me:  there are no savannahs across which to wend your way, no rutted dirt roads switchbacking up mountain sides.  There are perfectly flat streets at sea level in a climate where two inches of snow is considered a blizzard. 

 

As the London streets bore few signs of conspicuous automotive consumption, neither did our London flat bear signs of conspicuous appliance consumption.  At least not in this century.  The microwave was the size of a toaster and looked like either Lenin or the Jetsons had built it.  The washing machine and dryer, both of which were located in the kitchen, were gunmetal gray and size-wise, would have been perfect in the home of a Munchkin family.  I started our first load of clothes and a half-hour later went in to check on its progress, and a half hour later checked again, and again, and again – until after a mere 2 ½ hours had passed, our clothes were sparking clean!  The dryer was equally sized and equally efficient.  A long white tube was coiled between the dryer and the wall, and you had to carefully extract the tube and run it out the kitchen window to vent.  You thought twice about washing your clothes, believe me.

 

And maybe that’s just part of the “making do” ethos of London.  Instead of having flashy extras like indoor pools in this house exchange, we had less-tras that encouraged us to focus on why we came to London in the first place.  It wasn’t to swim, or lounge around a house stocked with every new convenience.  It was to stay a 10-minute walk from a mass transit system that could ferry you anywhere you wanted to go around a city pulsing with Roman, medieval, Victorian and 21^st century life.  It was to live, for a slice of time, in a real neighborhood and shop at its grocery stores, visit its flea markets, mingle with its residents.  We exchanged cities this time, not houses.  And that was the best extra we could have hoped for.